Outside of Christ, our minds are founded on the ceaseless subtle invocation: “I am Lord, I am Lord, I am Lord.” Scripturally, this is rooted in the moment of temptation at the Fall, when the subtle serpent offered the fruit of knowledge as a means of becoming like God. Eating the fruit, man has ever since transferred his center from God to self. As such, man’s center is now self.
Converting to Christ, therefore, refers not to making Christ an ornament to a self-as-center mode of existence, which is to say adding another layer to fallen egocentrism, but refers instead to the process of exchanging self-as-center for Christ-as-center. Conversion is not perfecting self-life, but ending self-life and being reborn into new life, the life of Christ.
In this light, the Jesus Prayer serves not merely as an expression of piety, but as a divinely prescribed means for uprooting the self from its position as the practical center of one’s being. It is the practical means, so to speak, of training the mind, heart, and will to find its center not in self, but in Christ.
The essence of humility, the Jesus Prayer thus expresses the highest form of repentance, conversion, and cross-bearing, and likewise the highest means outside of the Eucharist for realizing Christ as the central point and ground of our being, as in truth He is.
